SJWIFF Films on the Go
Featuring six short films by Brianna Russell, Mallory Clarke, Nicola Hawkins, Holly Andersen, Heather Campbell, and Stacy Gardner
Various locations, Summer 2024
Reviewed by Alec Brookes
August 1st saw “Films on the Go” hosted at the Craft Council in St. John’s. “Films on the Go” is a summer program of the St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival. The film festival has curated six short films from last year’s festival, shot by local directors, with the idea that screenings can be hosted, free of charge, across the province. Currently, there are screenings scheduled in August from St. John’s to Twillingate.
The first short is Poster Child, directed by the 2022 Michelle Jackson Emerging Filmmaker Award winner, Brianna Russell. The film focuses on the tense encounter between an established pianist, who requires a replacement after an injury, and a young prodigy set to replace her. Following a brief promo for SJIWFF, which highlights the festival’s record for mentoring young talent, the short film aims to show the flipside, when the would-be mentor treats the prodigy with contempt.
Mallory Clarke’s First Position follows with its own tensions between women, this time between ex-lovers. Clarke uses the episodic nature of the short to focus on the intensity of a single exchange. Clarke transforms that intensity into a sudden, demonic twist at the end, where both sides are implicated.
Several of the shorts put film in conversation with other media. Russell’s poster child, which revolves around a rehearsal of one of Chopin’s nocturnes, is one. Another is Scored by Time, directed and choreographed by Nicola Hawkins. Set to Brahms, Scored by Time, is an interpretive dance that draws on the cinematic possibilities of editing and rapidly changing shot depth to amplify the dancer’s interpretation.
Two of the films included in “Films of the Go” are NFB productions that shift our focus from Newfoundland to Labrador and the province’s fraught colonial history. Hebron Relocation begins as an essay on the director Holly Andersen’s own house in Makkovik, a so-called “Hebron Home.” The story of the house takes Andersen to Hebron and into a history of Indigenous removal and ethnic cleansing, for which her own house serves as an echo.
The next film, Miss Campbell: Inuk Teacher, is director Heather Campbell’s loving tribute to her grandmother, who was, as the title suggests, an Inuk school teacher. While the film does concern hardship—her grandmother is a survivor of abuse at the hands of the residential school system—Campbell’s film offers a counterbalance to Hebron Relocation, focusing on her grandmother’s resilience and ability to gain acceptance.
Per the festival’s mandate, each of the films is by women, and more often than not they centre women. Among them, Gaze is perhaps the most concerned with the issue of representation. The title itself, as well as the subject matter, is a clear allusion to Laura Mulvey’s classic article on the male gaze in cinema: the power of the cinematic eye historically to render women as its object, and never its subject. The short documentary is about Petty Harbor-based Korean painter Ginok Song. Per the documentary, painting provides her the opportunity for self-realization and the realization of her agency after an upbringing by a patriarchal father figure who denied her as much. Painting emerges as an important intervention into the normal functions of the cinematic, masculinist gaze. The film neatly ties together the multimedia theme with which the series began, and self-consciously explores the possibilities of women’s representation, a theme that ties the “Films on the Go” collection and indeed SJIWFF together.
Alec Brookes is father to Olive. He is also Associate Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Memorial University. He will be teaching a new course, Feminism and Film, this fall.
August, 2024